The latest batch of paperbacks are reviewed, including Dermot Bolger's The Woman's Daughter and The Indian Mutiny by Saul David.
The Indian Mutiny. Saul David, Penguin, £8.99
Did the Indian Mutiny of 1857 occur because native troops of the British army in India refused to bite cartridges greased with cow and pig fat - the former unacceptable to Hindu soldiers and the latter abhorrent to Muslims? So it has been traditionally taught but other factors played a part. However, it was the cartridge issue that provided the spark because it enabled the conspirators to spread a rumour about a government plot to convert the natives forcibly to Christianity. When an upheaval is imminent, the British army always seems to have a bonehead officer or two to force the moment to its crisis and the Indian Mutiny was no exception. The mutiny itself is covered in great but not tedious detail. The author writes almost exclusively from the British point of view and never questions what they were doing on this vast subcontinent so far from their own island. - Brian Maye
God's Fool. By Mark Slouka, Picador, £7.99
For his first novel, Czech-American writer Slouka has opted to fictionalise the life of the original Siamese twins, (a task previously attempted by Darin Strauss in Chang and Eng). The tale moves from the Southern states during the Civil War to Siam (now Thailand), Paris, London and back to North Carolina. The narrator is Chang, the more extroverted of the twins, who were born in a village upriver from Bangkok, perfectly formed but joined by a bridge of cartilage at their sides. Slouka paints a series of vivid tableaux as seen through Chang's eyes . The writer's imagination, perception and steady, often beautiful prose - at its most impressive when he is describing the pastoral loveliness of the southern farmlands where they eventually build houses and lives - are up to the unusual task. An ambitious and a peculiar book but an intriguing one. - Cathy Dillon
The Woman's Daughter. Dermot Bolger, Flamingo, £7.99
A woman who keeps her daughter hidden in her room for 20 years becomes the catalyst for Dermot Bolger to begin his meditation on the nature of relationships and repression within family and a wider world. It is a narrative that brings together numerous voices and perspectives from different times in the 19th and 20th centuries, and Bolger's novel succeeds in knitting together these different strands powerfully and poetically. It is the locale of Finglas in Dublin's Northside, however, which truly binds these separate stories and Bolger brilliantly allows the past and the present to exist side by side in his descriptions of an ever-changing and utterly fluid landscape. A palpable sense of longing for a simpler time pervades the sections set in the present, which of course is undercut by the shifting narrative that suggests no time - in the past or the present - is ever simple or straightforward. - Derek Hand
A Perfect Hoax. Italo Svevo, Hesperus, £6.99
The "100 pages" Hesperus Press series includes neglected English and foreign-language modern classics in new translations.The Perfect Hoax, a tragicomic romp in literary Trieste, tells of a writer of no repute duped to believe he has sold his obscure novel after 40 years. Through Mario's struggle between dreams of success and humdrum reality, Svevo (the pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz) examines the "comic perversity of the human mind". The Perfect Hoax was first published in 1929, shortly after his most famous novel, The Confessions of Zeno, was finally brought to critical attention by his good friend, Joyce. Then 65 years old, Svevo, like his protagonist, knew all too well the wait for literary recognition. Sympathetic, funny, and realistic, it should be recommended reading for struggling writers and curious readers alike. - Nora Mahony
The Man Who Drew London - Wenceslaus Hollar: In Reality and Imagination. Gillian Tindall, Pimlico £10
Gillian Tindall is a writer of novels and non-fiction who admits to having an enduring and inexhaustible attachment to London. In this book, she writes of her admiration and fascination for one Wenceslaus Hollar, an artist and "the man who drew London". The 17th century city Hollar knew is largely destroyed - the Great Fire saw to that - though a large quantity of his work still exists. However, evidence of his personal life is somewhat scanty and here the author is forced to draw on her fictional instincts, which she blends with (admitted) meagre factual information. And, as often with such faction, we are left to ponder what is true and what is imagined. For Tindall, writing this book was obviously a labour of love, but while the careful research has to be admired, for the casual reader it is a laborious read. - Owen Dawson
The Country Under My Skin. Gioconda Belli, Bloomsbury, £8.99
Nicaragua, 1970. Sandinista cadres are engaged in armed rebellion against the bloody dictatorship of Anastasio Somaza. Gioconda Belli is a beautiful young advertising executive in downtown Managua, writing acclaimed poetry and busy being a mother of two. Belli has a decent but dull husband and takes a lover through whom she comes into contact with the Sandinistas. Over the next seven years of conflict, Belli becomes an active insurgent, remarries, has another child, takes another lover and then another, catches the eye of, amongst others, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, flees into exile but returns in triumph after the flight of Somoza. Belli then witnesses the failure of the Sandinistas government, marries an American in the movie business, moves to California and has another child. This is a thrilling, lyrical memoir of an absolutely remarkable woman. - John Moran